August 20, 2009 07:15 PM UTC

The Importance of Organizing

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• by: ranr

“The voice of the one became the voice of the few, and thus became the voice of the many.”

That’s how State Rep. Sara Gagliardi neatly encapsulated the necessity of organizing at a panel on Tuesday featuring her and three other people discussing the twin necessities of enacting health insurance reform and the Employee Free Choice Act. The four panelists (Gagliardi, State Sen. Lois Tochtrop, SEIU citizen lobbyist Mike Kingsbury, and Becky Sassman, who works at Kaiser Permanente – and is a member of UFCW) discussed the prospects for health insurance reform and employee free choice, the need for both, and we could do from here.

Some of the most harrowing stories came from the Kaiser worker who made two salient points that struck me, one a question, the other a statement. First, Sassman asked the people in the room, “What happens to people when we do too well with health care?” The answer to that dilemma, it turns out, lies precisely in that part of health care reform that’s been demonized the last few weeks: namely, end-of-life counseling. Rather than a “death panel”, all that end-of-life counseling means is that a person would have a chance to calmly settle their affairs while they’re still in a position to do so – and have that service covered by Medicare.

That’s it. That’s all it means. Opposing end-of-life counseling coverage doesn’t make it go away; it merely makes one of the most difficult times in a person’s life infinitely more painful, more difficult…and yes, more expensive.

Sassman then followed that up by relating a story about a patient of hers. In pain, riding in an ambulance, the young man felt compelled to call his boss and plead for permission to go to the hospital. “We don’t allow people to be sick,” she said. “We have become a selfish society.” The story served as a painful reminder of the irrationality resident in our approach to health care in this country – despite being in physical agony, that man felt equally horrible about missing work. There is something morally repellent about a system that fails to see anything wrong with that, and that argues that the solution to that is to do nothing.

You can watch highlights of the roundtable in the video above.

updated 8/31 for a correction: Becky Sassman works at Kaiser Permanente; she was not representing them. Thanks!